Embers

Chapter 11

I’t’s like this,” said Konrad after the trout. “At first you think you can get used to it.” He was speaking of the tropics. “I was still young when I arrived, thirty-two, you remember. I went straight out into the swamps. You live out there in little huts with tin roofs. I had no money-everything was paid by the Colonial Company. At night you lie in bed and it is like lying in a warm mist. By day the mist is thicker and scalding hot. Soon you become quite apathetic. Everyone drinks, everyone’s eyes are bloodshot. In the first year, you think you will die. In the third year, you realize that you are no longer the person you were, and that the rhythm of life has changed. You live faster, something inside you burns, your heart beats differently and at the same time, you become indifferent to everything.

Absolutely everything, for months at a time. The there comes a moment when you no longer have any idea what is happening either inside you or around you. Sometimes that takes five years, sometimes it ha] pens in the first few months. That’s when the r~ comes. A lot of people become murderous, others k themselves.”

“Even the English?”

“Less often. But even they get infected with this fever of rage, as if it were a bacillus, though it isn’t. And yet I’m convinced it is a form of illness. It’s just that no one has found the cause yet. Maybe it comes from the water. Or the plants. Or love affairs. You cannot get used to Malaysian women. Some of them are extraordinarily beautiful.

They smile, their skin is so smooth, their bodies are so supple when they serve you at table or in bed … and yet you cannot get used to them. The English know how to defend themselves.

They arrive with England in their suitcases. Their courteous arrogance.

Their reserve. Their golf courses and their tennis courts. Their whisky.

Their evening dress, that they change into every night in their tin-roofed houses out in the middle of the swamps. Not all of them, course. That’s just a legend. Most of them turn brutal after four or five years just like the others, the Belgians, the French, the Dutch.

The tropics eat away their college manners the way leprosy eats away skin. Oxford and Cambridge rot down. Back home in the British Isles, everyone who has spent time in the tropics is suspect. They may be respected and honored, but they are also suspect. I’m convinced that their entries in the security files are annotated with the word ‘tropics,’ the way others would be stamped ‘ disease’ or ‘.”

Everyone who has spent extended time in the tropics is suspect, no matter whether they’ve played golf and tennis, drunk whisky in the clubs in Singapore, appeared at the Governor’s receptions in evening dress or in uniform and decorations, they’re still suspect. Because they have experienced the tropics. Because they carry this alarming contagious disease, and there’s no known defense against it, and yet it’s somehow both deadly and seductive. The tropics are a disease. Tropical diseases have a cure, but the tropics themselves do not.”

“I understand,” said the General. “Did you catch it too?”

Everyone does.” The guest savored the Chablis with his head tilted back, tasting it in small mouthfuls like a connoisseur. “To become an alcoholic is to get off lightly. Passions swirl out there like the tornados in the forests and mountains beyond the swamps. All sorts of passions. Which is why the English are suspicious of everyone who comes back from the tropics. Nobody knows what’s in their blood or their nerves or their hearts. What’s certain is that they’reno longer Europeans. Not quite. They may have had the European newspapers delivered by mail, they may have read everything that has been thought and read in this part of the world for the last decades and longer, they ma have maintained all the strange formalities that whites in the tropics observe among themselves the way drunkards conduct themselves with excessive precision in society: they hold themselves too strictly, so that nobody will detect their chaotic feelings, they’re as smooth as eels and utterly correct and perfectly mannered … and inside everything looks different.” “Really?” said the General, holding his glass I white wine to the light.

“Tell me what’s inside.” And when the other said nothing, “I think you came he this evening to tell me.”

They are sitting at the long table in the great dining room where no guest has sat since Krisztina’s death, where no one has eaten for decades, and the room is like a museum of furniture and household objects from a bygone era. The walls are covered with old French paneling, the furniture is from Versailles. They sit either end of the long table, separated by crystal vases of orchids in the center of the damask cloth. Interspersed with the arrangement of flowers are four porcelain figures of the finest Sčvres: exquisitely charming allegories of North, South, East, and West. West pointing toward the General, while Konrad’s figure is the East, a grinning little saracen with a palm tree and camel.

A row of porcelain candlesticks stands the length the table, holding thick, blue religious candles. The only other light comes from hidden points in the four corners of the room. The candles burn high with flickering light in the surrounding dimness. Logs glow darkly in the gray marble fireplace. The French doors stand open a little, the gray silk curtains are not quite closed, and the summer evening breezes come through the windows from time to time, while the thin curtains reveal the moonlit landscape and the glimmering lights of the little town in the distance.

At the midpoint of the long table with its flow and candles is another chair, covered in Gobelin tap try work, its back to the fireplace. It was where Krisz tina, the General’s wife, sat. Where the place setting should be is the allegorical figure of the South: a Iion, with an elephant and a black-skinned man in a bur nous, all occupying a space no bigger than a side plate and keeping watch over something in companionable harmony. The majordomo in his black frock coat stands motionless in the background, keeping watch over the serving table and directing the servants-dressed tonight in knee breeches and black tailcoats in the French manner-simply by moving his eyes. The General’s mother was the one who had established French customs here as the order of the house hold and whenever she ate in this room-whose furniture, plates, gold cutlery, glasses, crystal vases, and paneling had all come with her from her foreign home, she had always insisted that the servants dress and serve accordingly. It is so quiet in the room that even the faint crackling of the logs is audible. The two men are speaking in hushed tones and yet their voices echo: like stringed instruments, the ancient wooden panels covering the walls also vibrate to the muffled words, amplifying them. “No,” says Konrad, who has been thinking as he was eating. “I came because I was in Vienna.” He eats quickly, with neat movements but the greediness of old age. Now he lays down his fork, bends forward a little and raises his voice as he almost calls down the table to his host sitting far away at the other end: “I came because I wanted to see you one more time. Isn’t it natural?”

“Nothing could be more natural,” the General replies courteously. “So you were in Vienna. After the tropics and their passions, it must have been experience. Is it a long time since you were last there?” He asks politely, without a trace of irony in his voice. The guest looks at him distrustfully from other end of the table. They sit there a little lost, the two old men in the large room, so far from each other.

Yes, a long time.” Konrad replies. “Forty years. l’ was when … ” He speaks uncertainly, stumbling involuntarily in his embarrassment. “It was when I was or my way to Singapore.” “I understand,” says the General. “And this time what did you find in Vienna?”

“Change,” says Konrad. “At my age and in my circumstances, all one encounters wherever one goes is change. Admittedly, I did not set foot on the continent of Europe for forty years. I only spent the occasional hour in one French port or another enroute from Singapore to London.

But I wanted to see Vienna again. And this house.” “Is that why you made the trip?” asks the Genera “To see Vienna and this house? Or do you have business on the Continent?”

“I am no longer active in any way whatever,” Konrad answers. “Like you, I’m seventy-five years old. I shall die soon. That’s why I made the trip. That’s why I’m here.”

“They say,” says the General politely and encouragingly, “that when one reaches our age, one lives until one is tired of it. Don’t you find?”

“I’m tired of it already,” says the guest. His voice composed, uninflected. “Vienna,” he says. “To me was the tuning fork for the entire world. Saying d word Vienna was like striking a tuning fork and then listening to find out what tone it called forth in the person I was talking to. It was how I tested people. If there was no response, this was not the kind of person I liked.

“Vienna wasn’t just a city, it was a tone that either one carries forever in one’s soul or one does not. It was the most beautiful thing in my life. I was poor, but I was not alone, because I had a friend.

And Vienna was like another friend. When it rained in the tropics, I always heard the voice of Vienna. And at other times too. Sometimes deep in the virgin forests I smelled the musty smell of the entrance hall in the house in Hietzing. Music and everything I loved was in the stones of Vienna, and in people’s glances and their behavior, the way pure feelings are part of one’s very heart. You know when the feelings stop hurting. Vienna in winter and spring. The allées in Schonbrunn. The blue light in the dormitory at the academy, the great white stairwell with the baroque statue. Mornings riding in the Prater, The mildew in the riding school. I remember all of il exactly, and I wanted to see it again,” he says softly almost ashamed.

“And after forty-one years, what did you find?” the General asks again.

“A city,” says Konrad with a shrug. “Change.” “Here at least,” says the General, “you won’t be disappointed. Almost nothing has changed here.”

“Did you ever travel in recent years?”

“Rarely.” The General stares into the candle flame. “Only on military duty. For a time, I thought of resigning my commission, like you, and traveling out in the world to look around and find something or someone.” They do not look at each other: the guest fixes his eyes on the golden liquid in his glass, the General on the candle flame. “And then finally I stayed here. One’s military service, you know. One becomes rigid, obdurate. I promised my father I would serve out my time.

That’s why I stayed. Though I did take early retirement. When I was fifty, they wanted to put me in charge of an army. I felt I was too young for that, so I resigned. They understood. Besides,” he gestures to the servant to pour the red wine, “it was a time when military service offered no satisfaction anymore.

The revolution. The end of the monarchy.”

“Yes,” says the guest. “I’ve heard about that.”

“Only heard about it? We lived through it,” says the General severely.

“Perhaps a little more,” the other says now. “It was in ‘17. I was back in the tropics for the second time. I was working out in the swamplands with Chinese and Malay coolies. The Chinese are the best. They gamble away everything they’ve got, but they’re the best. We were living in virgin forest in the middle of the swamps. No telephone. No radio. War was raging in the world outside. I was already a British citizen, but the authorities were very understanding: I couldn fight against my former homeland. They comprehend such things. Which was why I was allowed to return the tropics. Out there, we knew absolutely nothing, the coolies least of all. Yet, one day, in the middle of the swamps, minus newspapers or radio, several weeks’ journey away from all sources of news from the wide world, they stopped work. At twelve noon. Without any reason whatever. Nothing around them had changed, not the conditions of their work nor the discipline nor their provisions. None of it was particularly good or bad, it all depended on circumstances, the way it always did out there. And one day in ‘17 at twelve noon, they announce that they’re not going to work any more. They came out of the jungle, four thousand coolies, mud up to their hips, naked to the waist, laid down their tools, their axes, and mattocks, and said: Enough. And made this and that demand. The landowners should no longer have disciplinary authority. They wanted more money. Longer rest periods. It was absolutely impossible to know what had got into them. Four thousand coolies transformed themselves before my very eyes into four thousand yellow and brown devils. That afternoon, I rode for Singapore. That was where I heard it. I was one of the first on the whole peninsula to get the news.” What news?” asked the General, leaning forward.

“The news that revolution had broken out in Russia. A man called Lenin, which is all that anyone knew about him, had gone back to Russia in a sealed train, taking bolshevism in his luggage. The news reached London the same day it reached my coolies in the middle of a primeval forest without any radio or telephone. It was incomprehensible. But then I understood. People don’t need machines to learn what is important to them.” “Do you think?” asked the General.

“I know,” the other replies. Then, without a pause, “When did Krisztina die?”

“How did you know about Krisztina’s death?” the General asks tonelessly.

“You’ve been living in the tropics, you haven’t set foot on the Continent for forty-one years. Did you sense it, the way your coolies sensed the Revolution?”

“Did I sense it? Perhaps. But she’s not sitting here with us. Where else could she be, except in her grave?”

“Yes,” said the General. “She’s buried in the park, not far from the hothouses, in a spot she chose.”

“Did she die a long time ago?”

“Eight years after you went away.” “Eight years,” says the guest, and his pale lips move and his false teeth close as though he were chewing, or counting. “That’s thirty-three years ago.” Now he’s counting half under his breath. “If she were still alive she’d be sixty-three.”

“Yes, she’d be an old woman, just as we’ve become old men.”

“Of what did she die?”

“Anemia. A quite rare form of the disease.”

“Not as rare as all that,” says Konrad in a professional tone of voice.

“It’s quite common in the tropics. Living conditions change and the composition of, blood changes accordingly.” “It’s possible,” says the General. “Possible that it’s relatively common in Europe, too, if living conditions change. I don’t know anything about these things.”

“Nor I. It’s just that the tropics produce unending physical problems.

Everyone becomes something c quack doctor. Even the Malays play quack healer all time. So she died in 1907,” he says finally, as if he had been preoccupied with the arithmetic all this time ~ had finally figured it out. “Were you still in uniform then?”

“Yes, I served for the whole duration of the war.”

“What was it like?”

“The war?” The General’s expression is stiff. “As horrifying as the tropics. The last winter in particular up in the north. Life is adventurous here in Europe too.” He smiles.

“Adventurous? … Yes, I would suppose so.” The guest nods in agreement.

“As you may imagine, I sometimes found it very hard to bear that I wasn’t back here while you were fighting. I thought of coming home and rejoining the regiment.” “That thought,” says the General calmly and politely, but with a certain emphasis, “also occurred to a number of people in the regiment. But you didn’t come. You must have had other things to do,” he says encouragingly. “I was an English citizen,” says Konrad, embarrassed.

“One cannot keep changing one’s nationality every ten years.”

“No.” The General nods in agreement. “In my opinion, one cannot change one’s nationality at all. All that can be changed are one’s documents, don’t you think?” “My homeland,” says the guest, “no longer exists. My homeland was Poland, Vienna, this house, the barracks in the city, Galicia, and Chopin. What’s left? Whatever mysterious substance held it all together no longer works. Everything’s come apart. My homeland was a feeling, and that feeling was mortally wounded. When that happens, the only thing to do is go away. Into the tropics or even further.”

“Even further? Where?” asks the General coldly.

“Into time.” “This wine,” says the General, lifting his glass and admiring the deep red of its contents, “is from a you may remember.

Eighty-six, the year we swore oath to the Emperor and King. To commemorate the day, my father laid down this wine in one section of the cellar. That was many years ago, almost an lifetime. It’s an old vintage now.”

“What we swore to uphold no longer exists,” the guest very seriously as he, too, raises his glass. “Everyone has died, or gone away, or abandoned things we swore to uphold. There was a world for which it was worth living and dying. That world is dead. The new one means nothing to me. That’s all I can say.”

“For me, that world is still alive, even if in reality it no longer exists. It lives, because I swore an oath to uphold it. That’s all I can say.”

“Yes, you are still a soldier,” replies the guest. Each at his end of the table, they raise their glasses in silence and drain them.